Andrea Dworkin: Our Blood: Prophecies and Discourses on Sexual Politics

is also of course no way of knowing if she would have received

different medical treatment had she not been a girl. But regardless, it all happened the way it happened, and so she was very ill most of her life. Since she was a girl, no one encouraged her to read books (though she tells me that she used to love to read and does not remember when or why she stopped

reading); no one encouraged her to go to college or asked her

to consider the problems of the world in which she lived. Because her family was poor, she had to work as soon as she finished high school. She worked as a secretary full-time, and

on Saturdays and some evenings she did part-time work as a

“salesgirl” in a department store. Then she married my father.

My father was a school teacher and he also worked nights

in the post office because he had medical bills to pay. He had

to keep my mother alive, and he had two children to support

as well. I say along with Joseph Chaikin in The Presence of

the Actor: “The medical-economic reality in this country is

emblematic of the System which literally chooses who is to

survive. I renounce my government for its inequitable economic system. ”*1 Others, I must point out to you, had and have less than we did. Others who were not my mother but

* Notes start on p. 113.

who were in her situation did and do die. I too renounce this

government because the poor die, and they are not only the

victims of heart disease, or kidney disease, or cancer— they

are the victims of a system which says a visit to the doctor is

$25 and an operation is $5, 000.

When I was twelve, my mother emerged from her heart

surgery and the stroke that had robbed her of speech. There

she was, a mother, standing up and giving orders. We had a

very hard time with each other. I didn’t know who she was, or

what she wanted from me. She didn’t know who I was, but she

had definite ideas about who I should be. She had, I thought, a

silly, almost stupid attitude toward the world. By the time I

was twelve I knew that I wanted to be a writer or a lawyer. I

had been raised really without a mother, and so certain ideas

hadn’t reached me. I didn’t want to be a wife, and I didn’t

want to be a mother.

My father had really raised me although I didn’t see a lot of

him. My father valued books and intellectual dialogue. He was

the son of Russian immigrants, and they had wanted him to be

a doctor. That was their dream. He was a devoted son and so,

even though he wanted to study history, he took a pre-medical

course in college. He was too squeamish to go through with it

all. Blood made him ill. So after pre-med, he found himself,

for almost twenty years, teaching science, which he didn’t like,

instead of history, which he loved. During the years of doing

work he disliked, he made a vow that his children would be

educated as fully as possible and, no matter what it took from

him, no matter what kind of commitment or work or money,

his children would become whatever they wanted. My father

made his children his art, and he devoted himself to nurturing

those children so that they would become whatever they could

become. I don’t know why he didn’t make a distinction between his girl child and his boy child, but he didn’t. I don’t know why, from the beginning, he gave me books to read, and

talked about all of his ideas with me, and watered every ambi­

tion that I had so that those ambitions would live and be

nourished and grow—but he did. *

So in our household, my mother was out of the running as

an influence. My father, whose great love was history, whose

commitment was to education and intellectual dialogue, set

the tone and taught both my brother and me that our proper

engagement was with the world. He had a whole set of ideas

and principles that he taught us, in words, by example. He

believed, for instance, in racial equality and integration when

those beliefs were seen as absolutely aberrational by all of his

neighbors, family, and peers. When I, at the age of fifteen,

declared to a family gathering that if I wanted to marry I

would marry whomever I wanted, regardless of color, my

father’s answer before that enraged assembly was that he expected no less. He was a civil libertarian. He believed in unions, and fought hard to unionize teachers— an unpopular

notion in those days since teachers wanted to see themselves as

professionals. He taught us those principles in the Bill of

Rights which are now not thought of very highly by most

Amerikans— an absolute commitment to free speech in all its

forms, equality before just law, and racial equality.

I adored my father, but I had no sympathy for my mother. I

knew that she was physically brave— my father told me so

over and over—but I didn’t see her as any Herculean hero. No

woman ever had been, as far as I knew. Her mind was uninteresting. She seemed small and provincial. I remember that once, in the middle of a terrible argument, she said to me in a

stony tone of voice: You think I’m stupid. I denied it then, but

I know today that she was right. And indeed, what else could

one think of a person whose only concern was that I clean up

*

My mother has reminded me that she introduced me to libraries and that

she also always encouraged me to read. I had forgotten this early shared experience because, as I grew older, she and I had some conflicts over the particular books which I insisted on reading, though she never stopped me

from reading them. Sometime during my adolescence, books came to connote

for me, in part, my intellectual superiority over my mother, who did not

read, and my peership with my father, who did read.

my room, or wear certain clothes, or comb my hair another

way. I had, certainly, great reason to think that she was stupid,

and horrible, and petty, and contemptible even: Edward

Albee, Philip Wylie, and that great male artist Sigmund Freud

told me so. Mothers, it seemed to me, were the most expendable of people— no one had a good opinion of them, certainly not the great writers of the past, certainly not the exciting

writers of the present. And so, though this woman, my mother,

whether present or absent, was the center of my life in so

many inexplicable, powerful, unchartable ways, I experienced

her only as an ignorant irritant, someone without grace or

passion or wisdom. When I married in 1969 I felt free— free

of my mother, her prejudices, her ignorant demands.

I tell you all of this because this story has, possibly for the